Trade and American Jobs: The Impact of Trade on U.S. and State-Level Employment Update (2014)

U.S. trade continues to expand, and with it, U.S. employment. Today, nearly 40 million U.S. jobs depend on trade. This means that more than one in every five U.S. jobs is linked to exports and imports of goods and services. Nearly three times as many jobs were supported by trade in 2013 as in 1992 – before the accelerated wave of trade liberalization that began with the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 – when our earlier research found that trade supported 14.5 million jobs, or one in every ten U.S. jobs. Updated from past research and prepared for the Business Roundtable.

“I think trade is absolutely vital—because our jobs depend on it. Twenty years ago, trade supported one out of every ten of our jobs. Now it’s one out of every five. This is our future.”